1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method and a computer program for making a thumbnail display representing the outline of an image by enlarging a part of the image.
2. Related Background Art
There is a print preview function of allowing the user to confirm visually the print data on the display before printing to know how the produced print data is printed actually.
In the preview function, the user can know the contents of input images by observing a thumbnail display representing the entire images in reduction. This method is beneficial in making the image processing for a number of pages especially with a copier. In this case, many thumbnail images are often displayed side by side in a preview display area.
However, there were the following problems with the conventional methods of the preview function for a digital image input/output apparatus such as the digital copier.
That is, a purpose of displaying the image in thumbnail (simplified display part image) is not to arrange the reduced images simply but to summarize the image information of the input image over many pages to obtain the material for judgement. In the document that the input image contains a lot of character information such as the copy document, it is often difficult to understand the outline of page to be properly intended with the conventional thumbnail display for displaying one page of image in reduction, resulting in a problem that the page is apparently recognized as the character image.
Herein, when the document is described with the text data such as ASCII code, the user can know the outline of the contents of document by displaying its heading (caption), using a software program for the personal computers, for example. However, this facility is unavailable when the image read by a scanner or the general image photographed by a digital camera contains any character, because the caption is not prepared in the image data. Since there are many formats for the digital documents circulating in the world, the heading display of the text is limited, and in most cases, it is difficult to understand the outline of page, resulting in the problem that the page is apparently recognized as the character image.
Conventionally, when the user selects an enlargement mode to know the details of print image with the print preview function, the print image is displayed on the preview screen at the same resolution as that of the image in printing, and then the enlargement display position is specified manually by trial and error to confirm the details (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2001-63155).
However, with the above method, when the thumbnail image is displayed in enlargement or reduction, the enlargement or reduction position and the scaling factor are set up manually, resulting in a lot of trial and error.